Your Mom always told you to wash your hands. I bet you didn’t always do as good a job as you should have at hand washing. We discuss how washing our hands and other sanitation practices have led to our increase in life expectancy.

Who’s been

reaching into my bag of chips, how dangerous is not washing your hands and

other sanitation practices

The number

one rule of drinking water is that you always want to be upstream

The problem

is, there is almost always more upstream than you

Public

health: How Chicago solved its sanitation problem

St. Louis

didn’t always have upstream neighbors, but the story of how they got them is

pretty interesting

https://interactive.wttw.com/ten/modern-marvels/reversal-chicago-river

Chicago was a

booming city, but it was a city with a problem

Modern day Chicago River

Sitting on

the shore of Lake Michigan, it had plenty of water but you sure didn’t want to

drink any of it

In the 1850s,

the city had bout after bout of Typhoid, cholera, and dysentery

They had a

great source of drinking water in Lake Michigan, the problem was, the Chicago

river, carrying all the waste from the city flowed directly into it

The city

hired an engineer, Ellis Chesbrough to fix the problem

Over the next

10 years, the city built a marvelous sewer system that was ahead of its time

Problem was,

it still emptied into the river and that didn’t make the drinking water taste

any better

So they came

up with a plan, let’s move the drinking water inlet farther out into the lake

Over the next

two years, they built a tunnel that moved the intake nearly two miles out into

the lake

That worked

good for a little while, then one big storm was all it to flush (pun intended)

all that stuff out to the inlet

They needed a

new plan

The solution

was simple, we just build a huge canal (six times deeper than the Erie canal)

and change to flow of the river over the continental divide and let the might

Mississippi River take care of the problem

The had a

couple of other problems like the great Chicago fire to deal with, but in 1892

they started work on the canal that would eventually connect to the Des Plaines

River

In January of

1900, the last of the project was finished and the best of Chicago began to

flow down the river towards St Louis

Although

Chicago was enjoying the rapidly improving taste of their drinking water St.

Louis wasn’t too happy about the loss of their upstream city status

In the end,

there wasn’t much they could do about it, and to this day about 23,000 gallons

a second flows from Lake Michigan over the continental divide and into the Gulf

of Mexico

Public health

and life expectancy

If you look

at the life expectancy of humans, it hovered around forty years for centuries

As Thomas

Hobbes noted, life was nasty, brutish and short

Then quite

suddenly about 1850, it began rising quite rapidly

Until 1950,

the increases in life expectancy were almost exponential